Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to an error correction method applied to a memory device, and in particular to an error correction method capable of reading pages continuously.
Description of the Related Art
A non-volatile memory is generally used for many applications, for example, in solid-state disks (SSD), memory cards, digital cameras, digital video cameras, multimedia players, mobile phones, computers and other related electronic devices.
However, when the processing data (i.e. firmware) stored in the flash memory is missing or damaged (or due to poor design), the processing unit of the flash memory controller cannot operate normally, such that the user cannot read the content of the flash memory. Thus, there is a need for a flash memory controller which can analyze data in a flash memory and identify the locations of errors, when the processing data stored in the flash memory includes errors.
Generally, the error correction process and page reading process are preformed simultaneously for each page. Namely, devices must finish the reading and the error correction processes of the first page, and read and correct the next page after that. Therefore, the time that the system waits is lengthened, such that data cannot be read efficiently.